Warwick University astronomer spots most distant explosion ever seen in universe

Dr Andrew Levan who is part of the team who spotted the most disant explosion in the universe

Share

Get daily updates directly to your inbox

Thank you for subscribing!

Could not subscribe, try again laterInvalid Email

AN ASTRONOMER based at Warwick University has spotted the most distant explosion ever seen in the universe.

Dr Andrew Levan was one of the first people in a team of astronomers from the UK and USA to witness an exploding star, known as a Gamma-ray burst (GRB).

The explosion was briefly as bright as several thousand galaxies – more than a million million times the brightness of the sun.

And as it was so astonishingly bright it was possible to detect it at the extreme estimated distance of 13.14 billion light years, making it the most distant explosion ever seen.

The burst was first detected by NASA in April 2009 and the research team, including Dr Levan, spent two years carrying out a careful examination of their data to see if it was a record breaker.

Dr Levan said: “The more we examined this burst, the better it looked.”

The bursts can be detected by satellite observatories even when they occur at distances of billions of light years away.

While the bursts only last for minutes at most, their fading “afterglow” can be seen using large telescopes for days or even weeks.

Dr Levan said: “The race to find distant objects stems from the desire to find and study the first stars and galaxies that formed in the Universe, in the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

"By looking very far away, because the light takes so long on its journey to reach the Earth, astronomers are effectively able to look back in time to this early era. Unfortunately, the immense distances involved make this very challenging.

"There are different ways of finding such objects, looking at distant galaxies being the most obvious, but because galaxies are faint it is very difficult. GRB afterglows are so much brighter.”

The team performed an analysis of the light from the burst and were able to measure the distance using what astronomers call redshift. This had a value of 9.4, which is greater than the previous furthest away burst, which had a redshift of 8.2.

The team used the Swift satellite, the Gemini North Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope to see the explosion.